The Reading Challenge and space elevators

Goodreads has set me a challenge. Dully but practically called The Reading Challenge. Can you hear the rising crescendo of music that appears every time 'The' with a capital 'T' is used? Or is that in my mind?

Technically I set myself the challenge, but that was my past self, my January self. Since then I have discarded many skin cells, some brain cells (I hit my head - stabbed it, actually, into the edge of a wooden shelf) and have changed my mind about many things many times. Since that self exists only in memory and in my use of the site over time, Goodreads henceforth takes responsibility for my questionable choices. Precedence!

No, don't read that again! The logic is like rock, but not the kind you mine through. Just accept the conclusion on faith. This is a turning point in our relationship. Pseudo-relationship.

This past self of mine decided that I would read 1 book a week or 52 books this year. (Scoff not, you - think of me next time you pile your plate with more than you can eat!) Then Game of Thrones happened. Somewhere in the middle of that Agaat happened. Note to self: when entering a reading challenge, choose the short books, not tomes of 1 000 pages and more.

According to my rock-like logic, I am in February 2013. Which is great because February is my favourite month. Except that *revelation and more crescendoing* it's June. Not for much longer, but let's not think about that.

Just before I started this post, I discovered you can change the number of books your past self foisted on you. I am not a quitter. Ok, well, I am, but first I like to make the journey painful so that when I quit, my memory of my past self doesn't make me feel so bad. Instead, I shall read like... a voracious reader in the hopes of catching up those four months.

Shush. It's my plate and I can pile it to the moon if I want. No, actually, I can't. Not physically. Not until Google X or LiftPort or someone builds that elevator. The ceiling, then.

And if I don't make it... Will I crawl into a foetus-like ball and rock awkwardly? Will I run down the highway hysterically? Will I do something silly like invest in a crowdfunded space elevator? No. At the very last minute, I shall click on 'Update' and change the number to slightly less than I have read. The definition of cheating is all in how you view the problem.

Bibliolatry: an exploration

You're mouthing out the words still. Bib-lio-la-try with a jump and slide from 'Bib' to 'lio' so that 'lio' sounds like 'leo' and two quick rehearsals to get the accent (as in ' not your native drawl) correct, then the easy part: 'la' and then 'tary', except you double-check whether it is 'tary' or 'try' or 'tarary' (common mistake, I say, blushing), because when you run all the sounds together, you still put the emphasis on the second syllable, not the first, and 'try' becomes 'tary'.

If it were easy to say, it wouldn't be such a wonderful word.

It means to idolise books, before you ask. You knew what it means? Five smartie points to you who couldn't pronounce the word a paragraph ago. I'm comfortable admitting I didn't know the word until yesterday. Did you know then that the connotation of 'idolise' here is religious: literally to worship an idol? Only bibliophiles could conceive a word about their obsession that has religious connotations.

Who oh who would worship a book, you-who-aren't-bibliophiles-and-are-living-vicariously wonder. No, you don't. Because then there would be no blog post and you wouldn't be reading it, and this clearly is a blog post and you are reading it, so the answer is me - and perhaps you, too.

Blasphemy! Heresy! But listen here, ours is a quiet and solitary idolatry - we're not exactly sacrificing animals to our bookshelves. Just time and a few trees. If anything, we should be at the mercy of the environmentalists, except that they're busy raising money and protesting conferences and reading.

This whole blog is devoted to my bookshelf (with regular deviations into metaphysical crises, as befits a reader. And a writer. Ask yourself which of these you are). It's an altar. I admit it. An altar, not The altar, because I brush my teeth and eat my vegges on the other side of this page (which is incidentally the same side of the page that you are on). Sometimes I don't read. Don't cry. I read a lot. I just don't read all the time. Although, nothing else is quite as satisfying.

Devoted. Did you notice that? This blog is devoted to... Now I'm not the only one engaging in blasphemy! My blog is too! Like a plague it travels. This digital world mimics its backbone of hidden 0s and 1s. It is ordered and logically structured. Maintained by the pulsing of keyboards. It is to blasphemy what the gutters were to the Black Plague.

Don't abandon me yet - I promise I am not contagious. Although who's to say I didn't catch this from you?

The wallpaper of this blog is a black-and-white shot of a railway bridge. It looks as though it is three-dimensional, but it isn't. It cannot be. Even if Google Glass succeeds in displaying a world so convincing that you try to reach for a book, you cannot. (You will reach through the bookshelf, but don't worry, you can't get stuck. I think.) This whole digital world is one-dimensional and, to some extent, an illusion. (I don't really sit with my head propped to the side like that. Sometimes I change my clothes, too.)

Now that I think on it, the photo tells you what to expect from this blog: nuances, shadow and light, and hints of other things. A snapshot without a supporting landscape, where the viewer is two-faced (the photographer and you - oh and also me, since I chose it), that you cannot touch or walk into to find out what those hinting things hint at. And all so hipster-ish-ly black-and-white cool. We see what the photographer selects for us to see. You read what I select for you to read (granted, sometimes things slip from the edges of my fingers and perhaps you catch them).

To get to business now, my thanks to Barthes and Derrida and even Descartes for providing the argument I can't argue against but others can by burying it under the word 'extreme'. Meaning is lost, well, it was never there, I protest fists in air (on behalf of those oblique writers), blah blah, stop rolling your eyes. Can I then truly idolise anything? Yes!

Let me explain. Words are in on it. The whole business. Words are wind, Jon Snow. In Ragnarok (mixed references but you understand), the god Loki values nothing. He turns everything inside out and upside down to understand it and make metaphors of it. He's the one worth trusting when Odin's looking at you with his one good eye and the other eye that sees more, and suddenly you do not know who you are. He is also very serious and not much fun. I'd run for Loki's camp any day.

Words pretend, a lot, just like the trickster god . They gain your trust, though notice they never ask for it - the gullible lot we are, we just assume. Not gullible, no, just hopeful. Hope springs eternal, to complicate the barrage of sayings I'm throwing in the hopes that you'll agree with me just because you're too overwhelmed to fight back. (See what I did there?) But when you uncover their disguises, they laugh, shrug their shoulders and say it was all a hoax anyway.

Don't cry (again. You are an emotional bunch). When the one-eyed and all-seeing god is staring at you, it is very reassuring to know that it is ok to know that you don't know and that not-knowing can be discovery.

Discover. Discovery. There we go! Bibliolatry is idolatry of a tricksy creature - creatures - that laughs at itself and you (and you at you) and then leads you down the winding path. Paths. This blog is one path, and because the 1s and 0s (and our attention spans and our capacities to process information) say so, it can only be one path with one view, even if we can meander to create a beaten track from which we see the one view from different perspectives.

So, we're not blaspheming, if only because our paths are too convoluted for you to capture and prosecute us.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

Immortality. Now there's a concept. Concepts. A few thousand of. Religion embraces a number of those. Faith too. Myth. I read a book called The Infinite Book (spoiler: it isn't), which recounts a few thought experiments taking into account probability theories and human behaviour research about what we would do. (I would either hole up in Borges's library or vote for mortality - really, is one of these not enough?) And immortal life - I'd call that a tautology.

Enter The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

Misleading tautology? Henrietta Lacks' story deserves to be told. (I started to rampage about this woman's rights, a la Skloot's book, when I saw the other side of the argument. More to come. Patience is a virtue.) Henrietta was an African-American woman treated for cancer in the 1950s. The cancerous cells were like ants - she was treated for one cluster in her cervix and suddenly they were everywhere. After the autopsy, the doctor described the clusters as pearls coating every organ.

Enter the 'bad guys'. Even before Henrietta's death, doctors harvested the cells as part of a routine harvest for medical research. Growing cell cultures was at the time the medical profession's Holy Grail. Except, well, this grail was discoverable. A cell culture is basically a cluster of cells that you can sustain in the lab, outside of the human body. A ready supply of material to experiment on. Obviously, you need specific conditions, which was a hit-and-miss with no principle to work from before Henrietta's cells.

These cells being like ants, they divided like crazy, even out of the body. Short version: the cells were named HeLa and eventually companies began processing and distributing the cells for cash. Lots of. The polio vaccine was developed using HeLa and the cells are still used in labs around the world for research. Tada; this one woman has helped, is helping and will help to extend human beings' lifespans.

Did the doctors have the right to first harvest and then use her cells for commercial gain without her or her family's consent? US law then and to some extent now says yes. The book suggests no (unbiased much?). I was convinced (which speaks well of the writing) but now I wonder.

See, my first reaction was a writer's: to imagine scenarios full of philosophical meaning and emotion. Bear in mind: a) I am a nihilist, which means that in the absence of evidence otherwise, nothing has meaning (which explains my sense of humour) b) the story reminds me of a creepy short story about an ape subjected to scientific experiments that dies and returns to kill his torturer (and no, not Kafka's) c) another Gothic short story about a man who dies and is buried but his soul remains trapped in his body (burying my hamsters was traumatic and I want to be cremated).

I keep imagining that some essence of Henrietta remains in her cells, even those that form in the lab and not in her body. In fact, her preacher cousin echoes this, to my sentimental horror. Researchers have injected all sorts of viruses into her body, from polio to HIV, as well as bond them to the cells of an ape and clone them. Hee-bee-gee-bees. If this is immortal life, keep your blerry library.

And here my balloon deflates to earth with a whistle. Cells that have no will and are not sentient might be life but do not have life. (The whistle is a sigh of relief. The phrase is just a literary device!) Not only that, but the original HeLa cells are mostly dead (except for one or two frozen cultures, kept as a record). These cells are the descendants of roughly 3 times the number of days since the Adam and Eve were extracted. The line is immortal, not the lifespan of the cells.

You probably arrived here before me; revisit the horror of points b and c on an impressionable, imaginative and very empathic child. Ms Skloot also arrived here long before me. Roughly half of the book focuses on Henrietta's daughter Deborah. I thought this was a failing of the book, a pandering to the wishes of the family to get them to endorse the book. But Deborah, her children and grandchildren represent immortality. Each ancestor lives on, however diluted, in our cells. The life in question is that of the human race (which, to point out is not strictly immortal, as in unkillable and infinite. Just saying).

Which brings us round to the ethical dilemma. Deborah was profoundly 'messed up', and not only because of the issue with the cells and partly because of institutionalised racism (highlight, star and underline 'institutionalised'). She was paranoid, depressive and perhaps manic. She had little education and so was stuck in that quagmire of wanting to do better but not having the time, money or qualifications. All she really wanted was someone to explain what exactly HeLa was and why it was.

The irony of the story is that Deborah and her brothers cannot afford medical care or medication, despite the fact that their mother's indirect contribution to science cannot be calculated.

Taken without context, that fact seems profoundly unethical. However, if we begin to assign rights to cells and/or tissue outside of the body, things begin to get a little... chaotic. Does this apply to my skin cells? To a bloody plaster I remove? To my tonsils or wisdom teeth? Must the doctors get my consent before they incinerate the tissue? What if I want them buried? Do I have the rights to profit from your scientific knowledge and ingenuity, and from a company's processing and distribution structures? My contribution is precisely 'indirect' - tissue I happen to have growing in my body. Can we compensate evolution too?

(Hmmm that last question would make a good story.) Luckily, I am a writer, so I can pose the questions without having to provide the solutions. What a nihilistic profession this! I don't have to make a single decision without proof; I can put two (or more - I think that's called rugby) opponents into a ring and manipulate situations that reveal their essences. And, if I want, I can choose one side and arm it with steroids. But I still don't have to back it! Because I am but an onlooker. And you are but a reader.

What next?

When I was a wee intern, I dreamed a dream. To set this dream against a dreamy background: I have always loved been possessed by worshipped books, so I skipped from school to an English literature and media degree into Publishing postgrad. I studied with the earnestness of my namesake marching into battle. (Which was how I thought one captured dreams.) Halfway through postgrad, I raised my head, threw my hand in the air and begged to be an intern. They said yes, and later would make me do jumping jacks. Lookee! We've wrapped this up in the first paragraph. Not.

Interning was a dream and now the intern had another dream. (Even if this were It, we're now in the second paragraph. Crisis avoided.)

Editor. Intern Me knew I was an Editor. Now, every person who studies a BA with any seriousness graduates in existential crisis (I have the relevant data). Who are we? Where are we? What are we? Why are we? Are we? So 'knowledge' is a misleading statement. Let's quantify it. I had done well in my editing course and often felt as though the skills were being extracted from me rather than embedded. I could spend hours gleefully editing or proofreading. I edited menus. Signs. Emails. (Still do.) I intended to be an Editor. I was Good at it.

Aside. An Editor is not someone who checks for spelling errors and punctuation. Only. We edit for sense: Is there enough groundwork leading to this concept? Do the paragraphs flow in sequence? Are there factual inaccuracies or discrepancies? Does the artwork link with the text? Is every editorial and design convention consistently applied? Does anything smell of Wikipedia? And on. The Editor's job is to take an author's work and bang it into the best it can be without changing the essence of the work. And sometimes, if the work is really bad, we just change it.

Phone calls to magazine editors, emails to reviewers, persuasive marketing copy, book launches. This publishing intern was suddenly a marketing publicity intern. Recap: Editors are by stereotype reclusive, detail-orientated, routine-bound. Publicists? I see a disco ball and it is definitely not actually in my kitchen. My first job in the industry. Trying to convince different media to review a book I hadn't read and didn't intend to. A disco ball. Then they hired a real publishing intern. (I.e. Not me.) She proofread. I called the same people I had called yesterday about a different book.

I needed a sign.

To cheer myself up (for example, after doing jumping jacks) I would: Choose a book, caress the covers (especially if there is embossing or foiling - look it up and be amazed at the things publishers could do but can't afford), open the pages to look at the typeface and smell the paper. (Yes. Smell. Like you don't have a quirk?!) I'm not decoding and cataloguing the scent like a wine drinker here, simply experiencing, but my favourites are those that remind me of reading as a young 'un. This did the trick for a while.

But it wasn't a sign.

One week, there was a company sales conference. The publisher's in-house editor (we usually outsource this work) and marketing manager were flying up from Cape Town. The editor had a 'history', the industry was all a-scandalled (as it often is); no one apart from the directors had ever seen him - only ever heard his name or received one-line emails from him; and the office thrummed in anticipation. We were ordered to make a full report to a colleague who couldn't be there. We were prepared.

We almost missed his single appearance entirely. I was publicising and my colleague next to me was selling, when my manager came out of a meeting and into her office. Straggling behind her was a man, clearly a visitor by the way he was looking up and around him. He wore a tweed vest over a long-sleeved white shirt and brown slacks, probably brown shoes. He stood, put his hands in his pocket and walked to the bookcase behind and to the side of me. My manager called his name, and he turned and spoke to her.

Ever so surreptitiously (as if there is such thing), I scanned him for intel. He looked like a bird, a wren maybe. Not that he was small - it was the way he carried himself - daintily, I suppose. He was balding, with fine brown hair that he probably just combed once a day, without any concern about his balding. His face was average: eyes, eyebrows, mouth, nose. No prominent feature. Except, he looked at things.

Here was an Editor, of the Tweed variety.

I turned back to my spreadsheet but watched him from the corner of my eye as he picked up a large hardcover book from the shelf. He caressed the cover, front and back, as he eyed the title and the blurb. He unfolded it and flipped through a few pages. He didn't bother with the rest of the ritual. He leant down and smelt the pages, the book almost closed, in a V, to capture the smell. Yes! I haven't thought to tell you the importance of these details, to preserve the essence of the scent and your own nostalgia.

That was The Day I knew I was an Editor.

Everything is in flux: editing conventions change over time as someone decides that the use of 'whom' is matter of choice rather than a grammar rule; writing styles change as we react to stark melodrama of the Post-modern landscape; pop philosophy changes as someone wanders even further down the garden path. Dreams do, too. As an intern, and a young sub-editor and then project manager, I revelled in the detail as if I could control some part of the world with my red pen on a black and white page. Now a publisher, I long to manhandle concepts and leave the detail to someone else. This one though, I'm figuring out on my own.

Starting position: 1Q84

A trilogy? How blasè, we moan, hand to forehead like Scarlet O'Hara. (We're a dramatic bunch, us readers. After all, we choose to experience more lives, more stories. For fun.) These 'trilogies' are false promises: the episodes breed until, five books later, you're waiting for your favourite character to... die from old age. (My favourite died in Book 3. He wasn't old. There are a lot of pages to wade through after heartbreak like that.) Anyway, this trilogy is the Rhett Butler to your Scarlet O'Hara.

You know what book it is - the title is in the title of the post. So I can meander. Haruki Murakami's novels are not easy reads, in any sense. It's like James Joyce: You either think he's a genius or a hack. (Guess which side I am on. In both cases.) And that has a lot to do with the book you start with.

I started with Kafka on the Shore and didn't know what to think until the novel was almost finished. The author tells multiple stories at the same time and, although I enjoyed each story, I couldn't figure out where this was going. Then, like those clowns who twist and knot balloons into shapes (I hate balloons, incidentally), he tied everything up into a neat... poodle.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle was not as pleasant. I disliked it for the same reason I liked Kafka. The stories are sequential, not parallel. And like everything Murakami writes, the characters are symbolic. So you're carrying your interpretation through the different stories, and it's supposed to be 'maturing' as the novel develops, but the clues keep mutating. Your poodle is suddenly a sausage dog and then it's not even a dog - it's a giraffe!

Both novels are intentionally cryptic, I think to make you aware of the process of interpreting what you read and to give you the freedom to essentially create your own novel with the author. All very post-modern hurrah. In Kafka, Murakami beckoned me on to a shaded verandah to create our balloon animals. In Wind-up Bird, he herded me into a kids' party and went to run some errands.

With a win-lose ratio of 50:50, you might doubt my objectivity here. Surely I need another round before proclaiming his novels Monarchs of their own Bookshelf? Consider that, after Kafka, I could not read anything for weeks. The first books I read after both of Murakami's novels were Neil Gaiman's. After Murakami's plot contortions, Gaiman's novels seemed staid. I'm sorry! I can hear you O'Hara-ing again! My point is only (settle down, please) that I was almost literally transfixed by each book, regardless of my review of it.

So here we go: 1Q84. Released in three instalments in Japanese only, it was translated and released in English a year or so ago. (The delay between the Japanese and English editions amounts to the same anticipation at the delay between installments. Clever.) Now, I have my eye on a copy and that copy is mine - all 1318 pages, bound in a black cover, with a spine that will crack beneath the weight of the words and their symbolism...

But you don't eat a biscuit at once. No. You twist the pieces until you can get to the centre: creamy, chocolatey, jammy, whatever. You eat the centre first and then the biscuit pieces. That is The Only Way. Cease and desist. Put away that balloon.

So first, I will place the book on a central surface (my kitchen counter). Second, I will manhandle it for a few days: ruffle the pages to feel their weight, open the book up to examine the typeface, examine the cover (front, spine and back), read the introduction, read the blurb and (this is the real test of an editor - I'll save the story for another time) smell the pages. Only then will I begin to read, armed with a bookmark and settled in a warm spot.

Trilogies might be tired, but we still buy the books and read them - Robert Jordan would be a lot quicker to write if he needed the money to pay off a car. Trilogies are epic. Unlike other trilogies, though, Murakami is going to abandon me standing on a stage with a handful of limp balloons and a clown costume. Guaranteed. This isn't The Lord of the Rings.

Zoo City

The fierce storm outside is more wind than rain, I think. Fierce, but not fiercesome. Winter has moved in to Cape Town, early by a few days. I greet it from under a pile of blankets and (almost grossly clean) cat, book in hand. Except when I'm sleeping. Which is often because - let me whine for a second - fireants have moved into my throat glands and their armies are foraging in my brain. The book in hand: Zoo City by Lauren Beukes. A book set in my home town, Joburg.

I started out determined to rubbish this book. Its pages were meant to be bubble wrap beneath my fingers. (I actually find the act of popping bubble wrap spine-shiveringly annoying, but pretend I don't.) Why? Because the praise of this book locally has been close to sycophantic. Because Beukes has published before, to barely a rustle. Because writing science fiction is oh-so trendy. I sound jealous. I probably am. But I am also sceptical.

I won't rubbish this book, but neither will I display it pride-of-place on my bookshelf. Writing science fiction, as with travel or Mills & Boone, is way more complicated than it looks. The genre is, um, generic. Add 'generic' to any literary jargon you can fish out: narrative structure, plot, plot devices, characters and setting. Meeting expectations means mix-and-matching conventions. This is a particularly niche market, after all. Well. It was.

Beukes hits the generic nail on its generic head. As per the acknowledgements, Ms Beukes spent much time researching inner-city Johannesburg, drugs, and other plot and setting necessities. It shows in the powerful descriptions of places and people as the protagonist Zinzi circles the city. Sometimes she visits the city I know and sometimes I am a tourist in her skin.

Zinzi is an animalled ex-drug addict living in inner-city Joburg. As inner as it gets (and not geographically): Hillbrow. The perfect place to unleash a time warp or black hole or washing machine (terrible joke). No spoilers here, in the early noughties of this novel, magic was unleashed. All those guilty of murder are now 'animalled', a la Philip Pullman's daemons. Hillbrow becomes - after you! - Zoo City! There is more!

The criminals also acquire 'shavi': a psychic power. Zinzi finds lost things, but not people. She makes this very clear for about twenty pages, until someone names the fee. She's not exactly principled. (She's too busy trying to blend in with the masses and forget her middle-class upbringing.) So Ms Investigator picks up the trail - actually, the deposit - and then the rest of the book happens.

And this where Ms Beukes and I part ways. Zoo City's magic is ill-defined - it was not there and then suddenly is, but it is only present to the animalled (I think), and no one really seems to use it or care about it. The animals are part of it and, oh, there's some vision of hell that manifests when an animal dies. (Sidenote: Call me what you like (Zinzi would), but I would be uncomfortable about murderers with familiars and super-powers that no one could explain.)

In science fiction, there is usually a rational explanation of why the core anomaly exists. Here, nada. So I thought about it. Midway into the novel, Zinzi visits a traditional healer (although what this adds to the plot except for allowing her phone to be stolen, I don't know). Ah, I eureka-ed, so tradition is backlashing on modernity? Hold up. So you're telling me, um, that tradition and science are not compatible?

Strike 1. Rather refrain from striking the generic nail on the generic head for one heartbeat.

Science fiction characters are often two-dimensional. All good and well. Despite this, they usually experience a moment of potential growth. Some conflict with their - either withered or unused - values, that determines the resolution. Zinzi does not. I think. Maybe I missed it.

Zinzi is cynical, bitter and selfish, and it's not clear what she is fighting for - which is an answer in itself - because every science-fiction protagonist is fighting for something, whether consciously or through our omniscience. There is room for a fight in Zoo City: infringements on equality, freedom and basic human rights, or the journey of the heroine to self-acceptance. At the end, Zinzi is still cynical, bitter and selfish, but she has a car.

Strike 2. Same deal.

Tally: What Beukes wins on the swings, she loses on the roundabout.

Usually, I try to decode a story by comparing the introduction and conclusion. All that changes here is the setting and Zinzi's destination. And the number of scars she has. All we as readers have to fall back on are the conventions of science fiction. In Zoo City, science is replaced by magic. A bastard child of science and tradition, that in turn falls back on its stronger siblings - plot and structure. But are they strong enough to support us both over time?